Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Po Lu]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> You missed my point. I'm not saying the change is because of a stylistic
> issue - I'm saying the change is likely to create a stylistic
> issue. This will in turn cause more resistance to the change and
> possibly increase motivation to do whatever is necessary to re-enable
> gtk build. 

Reenabling the GTK build will be as easy as specifying
"--with-x-toolkit=gtk" at configure-time.  It's not being deleted.

> Yes, I know that and that is a problem for distributions where they want
> to minimise the distro size and number of packages which need to be
> maintained. As it stands now, most distributions include 3 packages -
> emacs-gtk, emacs-lucid and emacs-nox. As they move to support wayland,
> they will either have to include emacs-pgtk or continue with the
> wayland-x interface. The risk is, given they need GTK for both emacs-gtk
> and emacs-pgtk, they will drop the emacs-lucid package rather than the
> emacs-gtk package (unless we help educate them on why that would be a
> bad choice). To educate effectively, it helps to understand their
> situation and not just address the technical issues seen from a pure
> emacs development position.

They don't need anything extra for emacs-notoolkit.

> OK, so how does my Emacs default theme change between dark and light
> theme when I change the theme of my desktop environment? This never use
> to work and I assumed it was because emacs didn't respect the DE
> theme. I use to manage it via X resources. However, I noticed on recent
> installs under both Ubuntu and Fedora that changing between light and
> dark themes also resulted in changes to (for example) the menus and
> menu-bar from a light background with dark text to a dark background
> with light text. My assumption was that this was due to the GTK theme
> being respected?

The menu bar is not part of Emacs's own interface.

> Which is fine for those who know lisp. However, this isn't what people
> expect these days. THis was my point - lots of the comments and reviews
> for recent distributions of Ubuntu and Fedora have referenced greatly
> improved theme/style consistencies. From my own limited experience, this
> appears to extend to Emacs as well (to a limited extent, not the whole
> UI, just menus, popup dialogue boxes etc.

You can use Customize too, if you want.

> Ignoring the level of motivation visual appeal/style has to peoples
> decisions is likely to be somewhat naive. There are plenty of examples
> of superior technology/solutions losing to inferior ones because of
> non-technical reasons.

That doesn't mean it's a good idea to base our decisions on those
non-technical reaspons.

> I also wonder about how frequent these crashes and technical issues
> are. I switched over from gtk to lucid a little while ago. However,
> prior to switching, I experienced absolutely no issues and I cannot
> recall the last time Emacs crashed for me. I'm running latest emacs
> devel (29.0.50) on Fedora 36 (previously on Ubutnu 22.04). I'm a heavy
> Emacs users, running it every day all day and using it for nearly
> everything. I switched to lucid because the technical arguments made
> sense to me. However, I did not experience any of the technical issues
> you reference. If my experience is more common, then your purely
> technical argument is going to have difficulty gaining traction.

I'm going to say that you're simply lucky.  Search for "GTK" on the bug
tracker, in etc/PROBLEMS, and on this list, and you will see what I mean
very quickly.